So, we have swathes of information in hand, now. Treatments, loglines, plot and character arc flaws, and tension and pacing problems. All (hopefully) nicely organised so you can pull together all the aspects and problems of a particular chapter, arc, act, character or storyline with ease.  The whole time, I've been reiterating "don't fix it yet", "don't touch", and "just note what's wrong". Hopefully it's become clear why you don't dive in a fix the first problem you see - a lot of those problems are iceburg tips, or perhaps smoke signals from a problem much further away, or surrounded by other problems that aren't as apparent. Fixing things right off the bat is like sweeping the ice chunks off the titanic - it does nothing to fix the big problems, and you're going to wind up doing it over and over.

So, are we up to fixing it yet? Well, no. As you might have guessed from the title - we're not quite there yet. On the plus side, all this analysis will hopefully mean when we do come to the actual rewriting, you'll be itching to get your fingers back to the keyboard. But I digress - we've one more vital thing to look at before we start finding solutions. 

So, we have a treatment for our novel - a one-page-per-chapter breakdown - and an act structure, synopsis and logline. Now comes the part where we start looking at all these things, deciding what isn't working and - more importantly - why.

Note that there's no mention of how to fix things yet. Hold off on that until you've found all the structural things that you think need fixing, otherwise you'll constantly be rebalancing your fixes and your original work while you find new problems. So - for now, we're just isolating the cracks in the plot.

It starts out with pulling together a lot of the things we've just been creating:

Make graphs out of those rating systems so you can see the rise and fall (and progressive build, if you used a cumulative system like I suggested) of themes, character arcs, tension, interest and anything else it occured to you to write. Create a table (or another format, if it makes more sense for you) of plot and character information across each chapter so you can easily access one 'strand' of a story at a time. (This is why excel spreadsheets are awesome - you can code it to pull all those together for you). Take your logline, print it out, and tape it to the wall or somewhere easily accessable. This is now the Divine Commandment of your novel; everything must bow to it. 

So, you've now trawled through your entire, sprawing manuscript, carefully refraining from line edits and rewrites as you went, and pieced together your super-synopsis of what's actually going on in those pages, and when. Those outline-first authors out there: does it match your plan? Is that chapter really as compelling / important / moving as it was in the plan? Did you spend an unexpected amount of time talking about something else entirely?

If the answer's "no", then you either took shortcuts with your synopsis-making or were so unbelievably disciplined with outline-following in your writing that I fear you may've ironed out the creative spark of that novel completely. But I digress.

As I said last time, novels are too big to think about all at once. You can look at the general story or the minutae of a scene, but you can't hold all of them in your head at the same time and think about how they're working together. So, step one - we condensed the novel into who, what, where, why, how, and added some notes and ratings on theme, action, character arcs, etc. But that synopsis is likely stretching at least a page per chapter - useful, for later, but still too big for the moment.

 

You've done it - you've ploughed your way through the terrible first draft, squidged over the soggy middle sections, minced around overwritten dialogue and grinned maniacally at the world after placing that period at the end of the last sentence. It's finished. You have A Novel. Probably not a terribly good novel - we are, after all, being honest with ourselves about the realities of rewriting - but it's A Novel, nonetheless. You are now A Novelist. And now, it's time for big, serious novelist things like Editing, Re-Drafting, Revising.

No it isn't. Not in the traditional sense, anyway. If you dive in now (even after the requisite six weeks (or whatever your pause-preference is) of waiting) you'll be plopping yourself right back in that forest, trying to shape the path when you can only see a few metres ahead. Sure, your subconscious will have had fabulous ideas in the meantime, and you'll have realised exactly what that scene with the eggtimer and the chainsaw needs to make it work, and why it just wasn't feeling right when Billy left Jilly. But you won't have the overall landscape in your head - you can't. It's just not possible to keep an entire novel in your head as one big lump.

So - we need an overview of the structure, the developments, the plot, the arcs, the pacing, the tension. We need these so we can draw up a battleplan for that forest - for where the vicious pruning and careful nuturing will fall. Without this, you're really just writing another first draft. SO how do we get one?

 

The days of the Three Volume Novel are long since past. They were popular last century, when printing and binding were expensive, and novels were often first serialised in periodicals prior to publication. Part 1 was used to whet the reader's appetite for parts 2 and 3, ensuring an otherwise expensive purchase. With books being relatively rare, and life in general slower, readers were prepared to wait for the next installment to be printed - although usually, the books had already been written, edited, serialised and just needed to be bound and printed.

But a three volume novel is not a book series.

A book series is, at the risk of being obvious, a series of stories. Each story in the series is discrete, complete and structurally stands alone. It may rely on information in the previous books, but it has a hook at the beginning, a well-shaped structure, and closes off its end-points in the final chapters. It satisfies the reader with an ending, even if some of that ending leaves room for the rest of the story. Even if there's an overarching plot for the entire series, each book has its own plot that comes to a satisfying resolution.

The three volume novel does not do this. It's the one story chopped into three pieces. And it just doesn't work anymore.

 

When you sit down to Do Some Writing, are you someone who takes a handful of ideas and smears them around the page like cake batter, or do you have your itemised step-plan of scenes, pulses, beats, plot points and snippets? Do you know what you're going to write before it appears on the page, or is every moment a journey of joyful (or frustrating) discovery of (sometimes not-so) wonderful prose?